Harvard Students Launch 4-Week Training Program To Resist POTUS

The 4-week-course hopes “to strengthen the skills of citizens enabling them to take a collective action and effectively resist the Trump agenda.”

Harvard students have launched an anti-Trump activism course that aims to strengthen citizens to resist President Donald Trump’s rhetoric and bring a much needed social change to the country.

The 4-week-course is designed by students at the university’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Organizers of the program said they hope to train activists “to strengthen the skills they need to take collective action and effectively resist the Trump agenda.”

The Resistance Schools website explained itself as a practical training programme that will sharpen tools needed to fight back at the federal, state, and local levels. It says its goal is to “keep the embers of resistance alive through concrete learning, community engagement, and forward-looking action”.

The activism course is totally free and is open for registration to everyone in America and across the world. The program was created following anti-Trump rally’s organized by progressives after Trump’s inauguration, like the Women’s March and March for Science that opposed the commander-in-chief’s loud, xenophobic, islamophobic and unapologetic voice that brought misogyny, white supremacy and racism to the forefront.

“Resistance School is building a national network of progressives committed to in-person collective action,” mentions the brief on the registration document.

There are 4 sessions to the course. The first session will describe how to communicate values in political advocacy, the second one will mobilize and organize communities, the third session will explain how to structure and build capacity for action, while the last session will be on the tools needed to sustain the resistance in the long term.

People are encouraged to enroll in groups, according to the organizers and so far 3,000 groups "representing over 10,000 people" registered for their first class.

"Resistance School started with a couple of students chatting with a couple of professors, having a sense of outrage and despair and beginning to feel overwhelmed and exhausted with the question of 'What are we going to do after the election?'" commented Shanoor Seervai, a student at Harvard's Kennedy School and one of the cofounders of Resistance School.

Seervai has also been vocal about opposing the commander-in-chief’s agenda on her Twitter feed.

Fighting Trump's lies requires more than fact-checking. "We got caught up in believable rather than verifiable- @mashagessen@ShorensteinCtr